"America is not, nor must ever be, the melting pot," thundered Clinton Stoddard Burr in "America's Race Heritage" a 1920s prophecy of immigration's dangers. Collier's, a progressive literary magazine of the era, granted the melting pot's existence, but bemoaned immigrants as "just so much slag" because they "do not enter into solution but coagulate in alien masses."

To see the sites of that coagulation, take a look at a map of last week's presidential returns. Not the red state versus blue state version, but one down a level, displaying the vote county by county. It shows America as dots and smears of blue amid a sea of red. The blue represents cities inhabited by descendants and successors of the "slag" of Collier's fears.

The election pitted urban dwellers against rural and small-town America.

Where cities are scarce, as on the Great Plains, President Barack Obama got shut out. But he vacuumed up votes on the North Atlantic and Pacific coasts, where one metropolitan area can blend into the next.

For urbanites, it was a victory a long time in coming, cities being the odd man out of American culture. Europeans consider cities handmaidens of civilization, storehouses of the arts, gracious hosts to the good life.

In this country, Main Street's inhabitants disdain what they think of as the mean streets of New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. In America's psychological vocabulary "city" is synonymous with "alien." Which makes intuitive sense; many have been populated by generations of aliens — new arrivals from abroad.

Benjamin Franklin once asked: "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglyfying them?"

And Franklin only witnessed the first part of the process. When America was industrialized in the later 19th century, it had to import workers much like other countries import raw materials. Immigrants poured in to the nation's factory cities by the millions.

In its 1909 guide book, Chicago's Association of Commerce, noted that the city's "confusion of tongues is the worst since Babel!" and described the neighborhoods as "really little cities within the metropolis, each speaking its own language."

In Chicago and other cities, the newcomers spoke Greek, Italian, Yiddish and the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, or with an Irish brogue. They were Roman Catholic, orthodox Christians and Jewish.

That put the city on a collision course with the hinterland, where older-stock Americans were English-speaking Protestants.

Whatever language they spoke, big-city ethnics were supposed to keep quiet in the presence of their betters — the WASP inhabitants of the hinterlands. Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for president, lost big time in 1928, being suspect in the eyes of the electorate for having been born in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. When I was growing up in Albany Park a couple of decades later, Jewish kids felt it was futile to apply to Northwestern University, assuming that it, like the Ivy League schools, kept a strict lid on Jewish admissions.

After WW II, African-Americans flocked to the northern cities as whites moved out to the burgeoning suburbs — where a generation was raised for which the city was as unknown as the other side of the moon. Even now, when my brother gets a phone call from a potential client in suburbia, he gives directions to his Loop law office. Many haven't been downtown.

Republicans understood how to take advantage of the nation's demographics. They ran against the "other," as academics term it. President Richard Nixon's advisers formulated a so-called Southern strategy — courting white voters unhappy with the civil rights movement. President Ronald Reagan railed against a mythic welfare queen on Chicago's South Side.

Mitt Romney had a similar game plan: immigrants were supposed to "self-deport." Heterosexual unions should be the only kind of marriage. In front of the NAACP, he rejected Obamacare, predictably getting boos that signaled to whites which side he was on.

It seemed like a good bet. Obama should have been handicapped by his skin color and Chicago address. Romney's style is Anglo-Saxon and country club. But what he and the GOP overlooked was that a lot more "slag" had come to the nation's urban areas:

New immigrants from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Gays seeking comfort in numbers. Young professionals trading the bland suburbs where they'd been raised for the excitement of city life. Collectively, the "others" had become a political powerhouse.

So the most fitting celebration of Obama's victory was the more than 700 free breakfasts served the morning after at Valois, an old-fashioned steam-table restaurant on East 53rd Street, a few blocks from Obama's Kenwood home.

Its clientele makes it a melting pot — or rather, a stew pot of ingredients, each lending a flavor. The owners speak Greek, the help speaks Spanish. The affluent and homeless eat there, as do retirees and students from the nearby University of Chicago. They come in an assortment of colors. Before he went to Washington, it was a favorite of Obama's.

"He's my friend," said manager John Lathouris, explaining the freebies and observing that he hasn't seen the president lately, but that's OK.